Thread by @Claire_V0ltaire

Nathan Weinstock was an anti-Zionist Jewish radical. Today, he is the author of a study about Jews of Arab lands, who were displaced. The book was published in France in 2008 “A Very Long Presence: How the Arab World Lost Its Jews, 1947-1967”. 🧵

“The story I knew was that the Jews were happy to leave the Arab countries the moment they were given the opportunity to do so. We were not told anything about the Jews’ deep connection with Arab culture. Jewish writers were the foundation of Iraqi literature.

N.W. was one of the leading figures in the antizionist left in France during the 1960s & ‘70s. From viewing Zionism as a colonial project aimed at dispossessing the Palestinians, he underwent a dramatic conceptual upheaval that led him to address a painful aspect of the conflict.

“The uprooting of hundreds of thousands of Mizrahi Jews, who were torn cruelly from their homes. Whole communities who had resided in the Arab world, underwent expulsion, persecution and malicious liquidations. This remains unknown and it has been denied for a lengthy period.”

Weinstock espoused antizonist views even before the 1967 Six-Day War. He was invited, 3 weeks before the war to speak to the Palestinian students’ union in Paris.
The Paris correspondent of the Israeli newspaper Maariv, Uri Dan, reported about the event at the time:

In retrospect, Weinstock explains, that event showed him the degree to which he played the part of the “useful idiot” at the time.

In 1945, almost one million Jews lived in the Arab world, whereas today there are about 4,500, the great majority of them in Morocco. There is no precedent for such a dramatic termination of Jewish communities anywhere in the world, including during the Holocaust.

Weinstock cites a large number of attacks and pogroms against Jewish communities that are rarely mentioned in history curricula.
“The ongoing deterioration in the Jews’ situation and the atmosphere of hate surrounding them led to a mass flight from the country”.

Jews under Islamic rule possessed dhimmi status, which placed them in an inferior position, humiliated & scorned. Jews were not allowed to bear arms in these countries, a salient sign of manhood. In Morocco, Jews were made to go about barefoot, or to wear humiliating clothes.

The contempt in dhimmitude best demonstrated in the humiliating ritual of the subjugation tax in Morocco. Every year the head of each Jewish community had to turn over the money to the sultan’s representative, who slapped or hit him with a stick to hammer home the inequality.

In Yemen, the “Latrines Ordinance,” introduced in the same spirit, obliged the Jewish community periodically to clean out cesspools and clear away animal carcasses that blocked public roads. (The law remained in force until 1950.)

The Jewish minority that lived under Ottoman rule in Palestine also experienced dhimmitude. Anti-Jewish riots were fomented in the 18th & 19th centuries. The extortion & acts of suppression were so numerous that it was said “the Jews had to pay even for the air they breathe.”

Underlying the growing hostility toward the Jewish population in Palestine was the realization that the dhimmi Jews were shaking off their traditional legal status of humiliation and submission.
Zionism was determined to seek liberation and national rights.

The Arab world refused to grant the Jews of the country a status different from dhimmi, and they were even less likely to recognize the Jews’ national rights.
“Historically, dhimmi status is the root of the conflict.”